Winston Churchill once observed that we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us. I have written elsewhere about how architects and planners, albeit unwittingly, are complicit in producing an urban landscape that contributes to an unhealthy mental landscape.
Can we think of different ways to be in the city, of a different architecture that can “cure” loneliness?
— Tanzil Shafique in Fast Company
Tanzil Shafique, a Ph.D. researcher in urban design at the University of Melbourne, conducted a graduate design studio where students came up with potential architectural and urban responses to loneliness.
You can't solve societal problems with architecture, but architecture and urbanism can promote the socialization necessary for the sense of place that helps mitigate loneliness. Considering the epidemic of loneliness in modern societies. As the Hopper painting illustrates, there's a sidewalk and store front window for those in and out to see each other, vs. driving around a blank walled street level. Imagine saying this in a Sci-Arc studio as a rational for an animated and even beautiful facade that encourages walking around. Architectural politics have nothing to do with how most people experience their environment. There's a lot of research on the subject, which I've offered to post here.
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So, how do you have a crime-free city in modern-day America without turning it into a gestapo zone?
How do you allow free movement and acceptance of all while freely allowing people to pee and poo and drop their used drug needles on the public streets and sidewalks?
I think it really does. Our ancient culture is all about that. and how architecture would facilitate a way of life which was conducive to a personal space for an individual as well as communal living.
Would love to read more on the same. Any links or articles i can gor through ?
You can't solve socio-economic problems like poverty, homelessness, unemployment, and substance abuse with architecture.
Architecture does not lead culture, it follows it. Thus the preponderance of starchitects, McMansions, monuments to corporate fascism, etc., the shitty condition of public services and infrastructure, and so on.
But in a way, architecture/urban design/planning are the physical manifestations of an ideology, very clear in the soviet remains, less so in american suburbia? Havana? and everywhere in between. Isn't what we do an affirmation of what our societies stand for?
Suburbia is very much a manifestation of ideology. So is domination of the built environment by the automobile, health insurance, war, etc. Once again the lowest common demonstrator is economics. It doesn't have to be this way.
for a few, it has to be this way - otherwise their wealth and luxuries would vanish. The question is, how much longer until the rest of us recognize we are just that? the rest....
You can't solve societal problems with architecture, but architecture and urbanism can promote the socialization necessary for the sense of place that helps mitigate loneliness. Considering the epidemic of loneliness in modern societies. As the Hopper painting illustrates, there's a sidewalk and store front window for those in and out to see each other, vs. driving around a blank walled street level. Imagine saying this in a Sci-Arc studio as a rational for an animated and even beautiful facade that encourages walking around. Architectural politics have nothing to do with how most people experience their environment. There's a lot of research on the subject, which I've offered to post here.
Architecture should not be concerned with changing “the public’s” behaviors by treating humans like pinballs. The role of architecture is much simpler.
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